Electric pencil sharpeners are known. These typically incorporate an electric motor driving a cutting implement such as a blade and a sensor to detect the presence of a pencil adjacent to the blade. When the sensor detects the presence of a pencil, the motor is activated to turn the blade and thereby sharpen the pencil. A problem with such known pencil sharpeners is that it is not known precisely when the pencil is sufficiently sharpened and therefore the motor keeps turning and the pencil is cut unnecessarily short, resulting in waste of pencil material.